"I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens," he protested.

I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare, but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging along in the office and—Do you know the latest?

Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn’t really an authority.

"Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ ’em—These teachers—how do they get that way?"

"Ask Dant’ how Jack Shakespeare and old Verg’—the guy they named after me—are gettin’ along, and don’t they wish they could get into the movie game!" he blared, and instantly all was mirth.

"I’ll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those.

Of course I don’t want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there’s things in Shakespeare—not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really, they weren’t at all nice."

"By golly," Babbitt droned, "wouldn’t be so bad to go over to the Old Country and take a squint at all these ruins, and the place where Shakespeare was born.